


If you believe in me, I'll still believe

by someassemblingrequired



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bromance, Coulsons/Clint/Natasha if you squint, Going On Facebook: A Darcy Lewis Fic Exchange, brofeels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2012-10-12
Packaged: 2017-11-16 04:03:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someassemblingrequired/pseuds/someassemblingrequired
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six weeks after what she fondly refers to as 'The Pop-Tart Eating Alien Incident,' Jane comes to Darcy bad news. Not just regular bad news, but the "oh fuck, now what the fuck do I fucking do" kind of bad news that you usually only hear about in movies or books about women who triumph despite the odds being stacked innumerably against them. Hell, this is like "Harry, you need to face Voldemort, but you can't have a wand or anything" kind of bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If you believe in me, I'll still believe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peacefulboo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacefulboo/gifts).



> Written for the Darcy Lewis "Oh my god, this is totally GOING ON FACEBOOK" fic exchange. For the lovely Boofadil, who requested Darcy not just being handed her place in SHIELD, but rather having to work for it. Well, something like that. That was what I got out of it. I hope you enjoyed it!

Six weeks after what she fondly refers to as 'The Pop-Tart Eating Alien Incident,' Jane comes to Darcy bad news. Not just regular bad news, but the "oh fuck, now what the fuck do I fucking do" kind of bad news that you usually only hear about in movies or books about women who triumph despite the odds being stacked innumerably against them. Hell, this is like "Harry, you need to face Voldemort, but you can't have a wand or anything" kind of bad.

Her entire internship is voided because, hello, all the work has been redacted. Which means she can't get her Applied Science credits. Which means that she can't graduate. Which means, well fuck, time to take her 3.87 GPA and transfer her ass out of Culver, because she doesn't think she can stand going back there and sticking around rural Virginia for another year.

But transferring means giving up credits, because everyone knows that you need to do 60 credits in-residence at any given school, so she'll be a 22-year-old junior and doesn't that just fucking suck? Yeah. But "whatever," she tells Jane. Because maybe she can get into a better school than Culver, and with that she winks because Erik and Jane both splutter and insist that Culver is one of the best schools in the country, and will insist such until their dying breaths. (Darcy won't be surprised if, on Jane's death bed, her last words are the Culver alma matter song). (But then again, is Jane ever gonna actually die? She's pretty sure that, if Thor has his way, Jane will be joining the realm of the Immortals within the next decade or so).

Oh, and PS, reminds Jane. SHIELD can't hire her without a bachelors degree, but they'd prefer a masters, so maybe she should look into all those crazy five-year BA/MA programs and try and get into one of them. Because otherwise she's shit outta luck and she'll end up just like her Mom, with a worthless degree in nothing at all (read as: welding from a NoVA community college…or maybe it was a CC in Colorado…or Arkansas?), and three kids from three separate men and not a child support payment seen for twenty two years.

So its with a little help from SHIELD that Darcy Lewis finds herself enrolled in the five year BA/MA joint program between Columbia and Sciences Po. She finds herself working her ass off in the summer to pick up the extra requirements she needs from Columbia, and in the fall she's hugging Jane (who's, bless her, financing Darcy's continuing education after a huge falling out with her mother over the phone and Jane adopting her in all but name and legalities) goodbye as she hops on a plane to France and hopes that her French is as good as it was when she aced her FREN 599 class in her sophomore year.

x . x . x

While she's in France (and fuck yes, her French is just as good as it was two years ago, so FUCK YOU MOM), she writes a lot of letters to Jane, and skypes Jane a lot, and to hell with SHIELD protocol about not skyping in the lab. Actually, Jane is one of the very few people she's actually kept in contact with since she left stateside.  
At the end of her first year in France, Jane flies out for a month to see her, and Darcy confides that she hasn't heard from her mother in eighteen months. Jane is prepared to sic Thor and Captain America (because Jane fucking hangs out with Captain America in her spare time!) in full regalia on Ms Fulton (because Lewis was so four deadbeat husbands ago) before Darcy shrugs and orders something in rapid French from the nice waiter whose been hovering for twenty minutes. And after she's managed to wrangle some discounted pate from the nice young man, whose eyes have been a little too glued to her rack for Darcy to not give him her token 'I know you're staring at my tits, and if you discount my meal I'll let you continue to stare without drawing attention to it' smile, she turns to Jane and just smiles.

"Jane, chillax." The words are practiced and just the right about of sharp and chiding. She knows Jane well enough by now to know that if she doesn't cut her off, the petite 30 year old won't stop talking until the cows come home. And they're in Paris right now; there are no cows for fucking miles and Darcy is sure as hell not waiting for them to walk all the way to Paris.

"If Mom had her way, I'd be living in, I don't even know, Indiana. With four kids that magic'ed themselves out of my vagina. Because, you know, that's how it works in East Bumblefuck, and that's how it worked for Mom, and her mom, and her mom, and every female in my family for the last, I don't know, fifty trillion years." Darcy grins as she speaks and rags on her mother, but it's obvious that she's happier here than in West of Nowhere with four deadbeat ex-husbands and a kid from each one.

Jane chokes on her wine and stares at Darcy with those huge, doe eyes that make the younger woman sigh. "I'm happy here, Jane." It's no SHIELD lab, that's for sure, but she knows that she wouldn't have been happy pushing papers or being a glorified pop-tart and coffee machine for Jane and Erik forever. Now they have actual lab monkeys (lab monkeys who got a two-day 'initiation session' from Darcy, who left them with strict orders to force pop tarts into Jane's mouth at least three times a day if necessary, and a color coded chart that documented sleeping habits and how to wrangle Jane and Erik away from 'science~!' and back to food, sleep, and those mandatory galas that they have to go to, because it's Tony (who she's only met two or three times, but seriously the guy leaves an impression) and 'if Pepper is making me go, then all of you have to suffer with me!') for that, and she has a future to pursue.

Jane looks a little flustered, and Darcy rolls her eyes. Maybe Jane has forgotten, because letters aren't really conducive to Darcy's particular brand of sarcasm, just how biting and honest her young best friend can be. Or maybe Darcy has gotten a little more snarky, to compensate for being around the French all the time. Either way, she's being honest. She is genuinely happy at Sciences Po. and no amount of cajoling from Jane would ever convince Darcy back into the lab now that she's almost done and can see not one, but two!, degrees in her very immediate future.

And sure, it had been a little weird at first; Sciences Po was made up of 47% International students, but between her already unique behavior and the fact that she had spent several months (almost a year? Maybe more…She could barely count how much time she had spent with Jane in various capacities) with a shadowy government agency meant that it was hard for Darcy to make friends. She had never been terribly good at it before, anyway.

But she'd gotten used to it. She'd made friends with a waiter, Jacques, in a local bookstore-cafe about a month in, and before she knew it, his friends were her friends, and some of them went to Sciences Po. And then she had this solid friend group, so unlike the friends she had back in the United States. They all wore sweaters for seventy-five percent of the year, and she threw herself back into the habit of knitting beanie hats. Scarves were practically a must, and she found that French clothes fit her better than American ones ever had.

And so she delighted in telling Jane all about the various crazy nights she and her new friends spent in Paris, and about all of the shenanigans and the running from the police. She found herself intermingling French and English, and a few Italian words found their way into her vocabulary as well, because while taking her classes, she'd discovered a penchant for languages lay deep within her mind.

She was well on her way to being fluent in Italian. And she was thinking of Arabic next, because hey, if SHIELD wanted her someday, wouldn't they want someone who could speak Arabic?

x . x . x

She kept in touch with others too, of course, but none quite as closely as Jane. While Thor and Erik got some space in her weekly letters to Jane, it came as some surprise that she was sending letters every other week to that of Agent P. Coulson, SHIELD. Somehow, between the iPod theft and the return, the young brunette and the older agent had struck up something of an odd friendship.

Her letters were full of musing about French politics and social theory, and his were veiled allusions to missions he wanted a second opinion on. And it filled her with something akin to pride that he didn't go to another one of his jackbooted thuggy agents, and instead writes to her. He can't go into detail, and she respects that, even if she does double the amount of Men In Black allusions and notes that 'I'll be sleeping with one eye open, Coulson. Don't think your jackbooted thugs can just sneak into my apartment and go all clicky-pen wipey-memory on me with me putting up one helluva fight!'

She never actually did master sleeping with one eye open, but now she wakes up at the slightest sound, and she figures that's close enough, even if SHIELD does employee the American equivalent to crazy ninja people.

Crazy ninja people be damned, she still enjoys her nights in Paris. She writes Jane and Coulson similar letters, similar content, all about her life in France, and she gets similar responses, though with mildly different threats. Jane threatens to sic Thor on Darcy's new beau, a dashing young man by the name of Gaspard (who she dumps after she finds him in bed with Maribelle about a month into their 'courtship'), while Coulson offers to have him black listed in a hundred and ninety seven countries, and to sic someone called the Black Widow on him.

She politely declines all of the offers, but includes a query as to what a fucking creepy ass spider is going to do to her douchey sort-of-ex. Coulson replies that sometimes she needs to think outside the box. The only box Darcy thinks outside of is her political theory box, and that puts an end to that conversation (at least until she's stateside, and then she's interrogating Coulson, who came to pick her up from the airport because he has an offer for her, and a pretty red-headed woman who has a small smile on her lips as Darcy demands to know what a Black Widow is and how can she get one for herself if they're so dangerous?).

x . x . x

One alien invasion, two new languages (and she now speaks four fluently, so fuck you, Mom!), two shiny new degrees (again, fuck you, Mom!), three years, an eight hour flight, and one extremely frustrating phone call with Jane ("Jane! Coulson already said he was going to do it. Said he wants to talk to me about something. I think this is the part where he uses the clicky pen to wipe my me-- What do you mean, what clicky pen?! Christ almighty, Jane. We're having a girls weekend. That means all of the movies you missed out on because you were too busy eating, breathing, and living science.") later, and Darcy is back on American soil for the first time in a long time.

She misses France, but she has to admit she's missed the scenery here too. She catches sight of a sign that reads "LEWIS" in large, block letter, and she rolls her eyes before tugging her suitcase along behind her. Everything else was packed up into boxes and shipped over, because hell, if she's carrying three years worth of stuff across an ocean with her on a plane, she's gonna need a lot more arms and some majorly huge suitcases.

The suit holding the sign is a little older than he was the last time she saw him, and she notices that the woman beside him, a lithe redhead with a dangerous look in her eye, is standing almost protectively around his left side. She'd heard something had happened (when she hadn't received a letter in a month, she'd actually called SHIELD (and boy did that warrant a visit from some suits. It took three letters and a business card to prove that Coulson affixed a phone number for her to contact him at before they believed she wasn't a threat. Well, three letters, a business card, a phone call from Jane, and an impromptu visit from Thor…) to find out what was going on, and had been told that "Agent Coulson is…indisposed. He'll be in touch."

When the letters started up again, she knew she'd have to wait to find out (if she ever did) and she tried (tried being the operative word) to push it to the back of her mind. Now, she simply grinned at him. "Black blocky print is so 1995, Coulson. Didn't you learn anything from Supernanny?" She hears a choked laugh from the woman beside her secondary mentor-of-sorts, and grins. She can't see through his trademark Men in Black sunglasses (and she's willing to bet he inherited them from dear old Dad, because come on, MiB is totally real and Coulson is TOTALLY Agent K's son. There is no doubt in her mind), but she's three hundred and ninety-seven percent positive that he just rolled his eyes.

She's been back for less than twenty minutes and she's already got him exasperated. Score one for the boys back home. As he reaches out for her suitcase, she catches the glint of a silver chain and…holy fuck, is that a wedding band around that necklace?!, around his neck. And she immediately latches onto it. "COULSON. You didn't tell me you got married! You're the worst friend ever." Emphasis on the 'ever.'

The redhead looks like she's about to explode with laughter. Or at least, as close as her face seems to come. There's a twitch at the corner of her lips and her eyes are twinkling.

And then Darcy notices there's actually two rings on the band and…wow, really, Coulson? Two partners? She'll give him hell for this forever.  
Possibly forever and a day.

x . x . x

She keeps badgering him in the car, with the red head (whose name is apparently Natasha, and doesn't that sound familiar…) keeping her features so cool and collected that Darcy has already come up with fifteen different back stories by the time they reach a shady looking building in the middle of Hells Kitchen, New York City. And this is most definitely not her apartment.

"Darcy Lewis, I'd like to speak to you about the Avengers Initiative."

Oh, _fuck._


End file.
